Caryn James

Review, Behind the Candelabra: Brilliant Michael Douglas, Kitsch and Depth

2013-05-22T12:46:00-04:00

Despite the earnest pr spin surrounding it, Behind the Candelabra invites us to laugh at -- not always with -- the grinning, gaudy Vegas spectacle that is Liberace. But Michael Douglas's performance is also deep, sympathetic and brilliant, an act of impeccable mimicry that reveals the essence of a man defined by his fame as surely as he is encased in his spangled tux. The wonder of Steven Soderbergh's hugely entertaining film is that it beautifully walks the line between hilarious kitsch and character study.

The story follows Scott Thorson, Liberace's boy toy and live-in love during the late '70s played by Matt Damon with his usual conviction and ease. Taken by his friend Bob (Scott Bakula, looking one step away from the Village People) to see one of Liberace's flamboyant Vegas shows, Scott is surprised at how the mainstream, middle-aged crowd embraces something so gay. "Oh, they have no idea he's gay," Bob says, introducing one of the major themes in Richard LaGravanese's deft screenplay: the response of Liberace's straight audience was part naivete, part willful blindness, a reaction that existed in a particular moment in time.

Based on the real Scott Thorson's memoir, the story is seen through Scott's point of view, and Damon creates a young man raised in foster homes, flattered by the attention and the lavishness of his new friend's life, willing to sell himself into an arrangement with an older man. Damon -- the most underrated of actors because he so powerfully underplays -- makes Scott's youth his excuse for some odd choices. Damon is terrific, but the film belongs to Douglas.

He has the voice down cold, the nasal drawl that turns Scott's name into two syllables: Sco-ot. But Liberace never seems like a predator; he's benign and, as he so often says himself, generous. He is also his own fictional construct; it's a great moment when we see him without his pompadoured wig, a sign of his trust in Scott, a scene this smart film leads us to gradually.

And he is ludicrously self-absorbed. The most astonishing episode, which really happened, begins when he asks his doctor (Rob Lowe) to reconfigure Scott's face to resemble a portrait of the young Liberace. Shudder. Yet Douglas's empathy for the character makes even that seem like a child's innocent Christmas wish rather than an act as creepy as it is.

Much of the film take place in Liberace's homes, gilded to excess. And there are many extravagant recreations of his Vegas shows (total camp now). Douglas's fingers, with heavy gold rings poking out of large ruffled cuffs, seem to fly across the piano keys in speeded-up variations on standards. Scott appears on stage in a chauffeur's uniform driving the car that carries Liberace and his $300,000 crystal-lined fur cape.

But all that fun leads Scott to drugs and an inevitable breakup, and a reconciliation scene with Liberace on his deathbed, still capable of endless denial. He was a devoted Catholic who felt God exempted him from the homosexuality-is-a-sin rule, a man who loved men yet successfully sued a tabloid for suggesting he was gay.

Soderbergh's production must have had wizards behind it, because the piano-playing seems authentic, the prosthetics indiscernible, although we know they must be there: Douglas has Liberace's nose, Damon's face is Scott's before and after the redesign, Rob Lowe's eyes have been turned into cosmetically-altered slits and Debbie Reynolds is unrecognizable as Liberace's mother.

Soderbergh's much-discussed "retirement" from film (which he's lately recast as "taking a break") is much less worrisome today than it might have been five years ago, now that the distance between theatrical films, television and whatever pops up online is diminishing so fast. Behind the Candelabra -- on HBO here and in theaters in other countries -- is the best evidence of that, a savvy movie that stands near the top of both Soderbergh's and Douglas's careers.

Good and Bad Surprises in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

2013-05-07T08:43:06-04:00

Novel? What novel? I went into Baz Luhrmann's 3-D, Jay Z-soundtracked The Great Gatsby assuming that the kindest, smartest approach would be to forget there was ever a book behind it. Surprisingly, the film is more attached to F. Scott Fitzgerald than I expected, and that turns out to be its downfall.

As he showed in Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann is a visionary, but his vision here is entirely focused on eye candy. He delivers the extravagance of Gatsby's world, the wild, colorful 1920's parties with flappers, fireworks and champagne -- the easy, shallow part. Yet he is also tethered to Fitzgerald's words, while failing to approach Gatsby's romantic, idealistic, heartbreaking soul. It might have been better if he had forgotten there was a novel, too.

The problems start with Nick Carraway, whose role as the book's narrator is justified on screen by placing him in a sanitarium -- the film's invention -- where he has been diagnosed as "morbidly alcoholic." Part of his treatment is writing about his experience of Gatsby. The conceit doesn't get in the way, but Tobey Maguire's flatly delivered voiceover does. It's Nick, of course, who tells Gatsby's story, who recalls moving into a small summer house next to Gatsby's mansion on Long island, hearing the rumors about his mysterious criminal past, and who discovers that Gatsby's spectacular life is part of his attempt to regain Nick's cousin, Daisy, now married to the brutish Tom Buchanan. Gatsby is the central figure, but the story belongs to Nick; he has to be observant and analytical, not the cipher Maguire's lackluster performance creates. (Find out about two better Nicks and two other Gatsbys here.)

You'd think the film would have bigger problems, like the hip hop music beating behind the 1920's, but that isn't such a bad idea after all. Most of the contemporary songs are used for party scenes, which are already so over-the-top that the anachronistic music becomes part of the circus. And the film mixes up its musical periods, using "Ain't Misbehavin" during a scene in the New York apartment Tom rents for his girlfriend, Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher) .

We've already seen a lot of that circus by the time Gatsby himself appears. And here is the film's one good surprise: Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems so stiff and wrong in the trailers, is wonderful as Gatsby. He's wonderful even though our first sight of him is laughable. At one of Gatsby's parties, a man turns to face Nick -- and the camera -- says, "I'm Gatsby," and we see fireworks explode behind him as Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" plays. Although Luhrmann surely realizes that the scene is stylized and excessive, just the way the wide-eyed Nick would have experienced it, that doesn't make it less ludicrous to watch. That is DiCaprio's only silly scene.

He gives a beautifully modulated performance, knowing just when to move from the stiffness of a man uncomfortable in the world he has tried so hard to conquer, and when to display the passionate romanticism that leads him to look so longingly at the green light across the bay on Daisy's dock, and to believe he can reinvent the past the way he reinvented himself, turning impoverished James Gatz into the rich, influential Jay Gatsby. His posture changes and his features relax when he is at ease with Daisy.

Daisy is a fairly hopeless role to begin with; she is idealized by Gatsby, but nothing very special to the rest of the world, ultimately as vapid as her husband. Carey Mulligan's Daisy doesn't even come to life with Gatsby. Joel Edgerton shrewdly doesn't overplay Tom's brutality.

Luhrmann allows what looks like bad CGI in creating the "Valley of Ashes," the shabby stretch between Long Island and Manhattan that Gatsby's bright yellow car races through. The use of 3-D is pointless. Those are surprising lapses considering that for long periods he seems to care about nothing except grand, sweeping visuals. The famous scene in which Gatsby shows Daisy his house, and she weeps over his beautiful shirts, has DiCaprio tossing shirts over a balcony at Daisy below.

But as the film heads toward its tragic end, Luhrmann becomes more insistent in his use of Nick's voiceover. On some level, Luhrmann grasps what has made The Great Gatsby so enduring: it is about Gatsby's self-invention, about his idealism and soaring romanticism, and his inevitable crash to earth. But what sounds eloquent on the page becomes too pointed on screen. In this misbegotten film, DiCaprio is left alone to try to carry the purity of the story -- an attempt as heroic and as doomed to fail as Gatsby's.

Movie Review, The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Mira Nair's Mirror of American-Pakistani Relations

2013-04-22T18:11:39-04:00

In a Lahore cafe, the Pakistan-born, Princeton-educated hero of Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist tells an American reporter about his reaction to the World Trade Center attacks. Changez (Riz Ahmed) was as horrified as anyone - but at first there was an instinctive smile, simple "awe," as he puts it, at the audacity of "arrogance brought low." The journalist, Bobby Lincoln, (Liev Schreiber) responds with a glare of pure, restrained fury.

We have seen Changez as a man whose only brutality is this admission of "awe" - it's a moment of ruthless intellectual honesty, not a wish for violence. Bobby has no patience for such nuances and has only Changez' word to go on. Who can blame him for being outraged? And in that confrontation we find the soul of Nair's thoughtful, beautifully textured drama, a story of distrust, misunderstanding and harsh socio-political realities - a mirror of American-Pakistani relations themselves. Like the best politically charged films, though, Changez remains a man caught between two cultures, and not a walking metaphor.

The film begins with the kidnapping of an American professor in Lahore, a hunt by the CIA, and the interview that Changez agrees to. Bobby hopes Changez may help lead to the kidnapped American, and Changez hopes to explain his personal history. As he tells his story and we see it unfold, we also see how Changez came to be considered a possible threat by the CIA.

From Princeton, he is recruited as a financial analyst by a high-powered New York firm. Kiefer Sutherland is wonderfully cast as Changez' self-made, enigmatic mentor, who sees himself in the young man he calls "Changes" until he is corrected. It's Chan - GES, (hard G as in "guess"). In New York, Changez falls for a photographer; Kate Hudson is definitely not wonderfully cast as Erica.

Changez finds himself in the Philippines on business on 9-11, and returns to a changed New York. He is held at airport security on his way home; he is later mistaken for a disruptive homeless man and hauled in by the police. He grows a beard, becomes angry, quits his soulless job and returns to Lahore as a university professor.

But is he a radical fundamentalist? We never see that moment of "awe" resurface. As he tells his students - and Bobby -- he had been on his way to achieving the American dream, but what is the Pakistani dream? Whatever the truth about Changez, some of his Pakistani associations are violent; that's enough to keep him in the CIA's sights.

The screenplay by Ami Boghani and William Wheeler is virtually a master class in how to adapt an apparently unadaptable source. Mohsin Hamid's first-person novel is a monologue by Changez told as he sits over tea with a mysterious American. The film turns this narrowly focused, uncinematic fiction into a layered thriller full of Pakistani and American players, from Martin Donovan as a CIA officer to Om Puri as Changez' father, a poet with no use for the business of financial analysts. The novel's open ending - who is the American? is he dangerous? is Changez? - is resolved on screen, the book's ambiguity replaced by layers of mistrust.

Ahmed handles the role of Changez perfectly, keeping our sympathy. And Schreiber is terrific at displaying Bobby's low-boiling anger. The extremely weak thread here is Hudson. Her emotionally-damaged character is drastically changed from the quiet writer in the novel, and not for the better. The new Erica's artsy quirks replace any emotional pull, and we wonder why Changez wants this whiny, self-absorbed woman. Hudson's distractingly fake dark wig simply calls attention to how much she's acting a part that never fits.

That element of the film is so wrong it prevents The Reluctant Fundamentalist from being as perfectly realized as Nair's best work, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake. And as in the novel, Changez' final recognition of what "fundamentals" mean in America and in Pakistan seems too bluntly stated.

Whatever its flaws, though, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is rich in drama and resonant with fraught cultural issues. It feels especially timely now, arriving so soon after the terror bombings in Boston and the aftermath of some ugly suspicions aimed at all Muslims. The cold truth, as the film itself reminds us, is that it might have been as timely at any point since 9-11. The film lands in and reflects our changed, fluid socio-political times.

For more reviews and to see a trailer for The Relucant Fundamentalist, please go to jamesonscreens.com

Movie Review: In Danny Boyle's Trance, McAvoy, Dawson and Twisted Memories

2013-04-04T18:28:47-04:00

Playing a sophisticated London auctioneer, James McAvoy gazes into the camera with cool, nerveless clarity as his voiceover gives us the inside tricks of protecting and stealing a painting. This opening sequence of Danny Boyle's Trance is no more than exposition with a dash of red herring, and shouldn't work at all. Yet it does because McAvoy's voice is so captivating, already layered with deception and delusion, and because Boyle's visual creativity sweeps us along.

We zoom into the auction room; we're in a van with a gang of mercenaries hired by the auction house in case of trouble; a black and white flashback shows us the good old days when it was easy to steal a Rembrandt. Keep in mind how well McAvoy and Boyle save this opening; that will be extremely relevant to the ending of Trance, a film that looks like a heist movie wrapped in a memory puzzle, but is itself a kind of red herring.

For a good long time, it is also fun to watch, with Simon (McAvoy) in the middle of the action when robbers rush in to steal a Goya painting that has just sold for over 27 million pounds. As he has been trained to do, Simon grabs the painting to carry it to a safe place, but is thwacked on the head by the mastermind behind the crime, Franck (Vincent Cassel), and loses his memory of what he did with the Goya. Maybe a hypnotherapist, Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), can help?

Very quickly, we're led to wonder who was really involved in the theft, then who's double or triple-crossing whom. This is Boyle from an excellent vintage: his first feature, the delicious dark comedy Shallow Grave (1994) plays the same game of whom do you trust? Is there any honor or truth among thieves? In Trance, we also wonder about the weird coincidences and lapses in Simon's recovered memories. At first, the looping, Rococo plot unfolds with such ease that we barely have time to realize there's a French robber and an American hypnotist in London, as if they were the U.N. of thugs and therapists.

Flitting back and forth between present-day scenes and memories, Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (their many films together include Slumdog Millionaire) create a sleek, almost photorealist London, with flashbacks and memories so sharp and bright it's deliberately hard to know what's real and what's not.

Too bad the twists become so overwrought, veering into pure confusion, as if the film were an unintentional parody of Inception. John Hodge (co-writer with Joe Ahearne) has done fantastic earlier work with Boyle, including Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, but here he -- and Boyle and editor Jon Harris -- let the audience get lost in the story's fog. In a long, middle section, even the love scenes are flat. The sex scenes include a full-frontal Dawson, McAvoy's butt and an art-historical conversation about shaving pubic hair -- when all that seems flat, you know the movie's in trouble.

There's worse to come. The "real" story, with the answers Simon has been searching for, lands with a clumsy thud. This time Dawson tells the story in voiceover, and she can't begin to escape the grinding machinery of that convention. Even with fiery explosions, the sequence feels like every bad legal drama when some attorney explains how the crime took place. The answer itself makes us feel like the rug has been pulled out from under the whole film - that's what we've been waiting for?

Even Boyle's visual flair lets him down at the end. You could argue that the realism suits the content: we're learning the actual story, and Boyle has kept the stylish touches for dreamier moments. But realism is no excuse for dullness.

Like Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects -- which shares a twisty, hallucinatory impulse and a weak script -- Trance is a disappointment from a director we know can do much better.

Boyle is a constant innovator, though, always worth paying attention to. Anyone who only knows him as the director of Slumdog might be astonished at his earlier films. Click here for a look at some terrific, lesser-known Danny Boyle films.

TV Review: Al Pacino, Phil Spector, and Media Justice

2013-03-29T15:39:51-04:00

The gigantic frizzed-out wig on Al Pacino's head might be enough to make you curious about Phil Spector, the new HBO drama written and directed by David Mamet. In a multitude of wigs as conspicuously creepy as the actual Spector's, Pacino plays the fantastically successful music producer and reputed loony-tunes guy convicted of the 2007 murder in his home of Hollywood wannabe and club hostess Lana Clarkson. The first question the film raises isn't about the murder, though. It's an issue that comes up with both Pacino and with Mamet today: are you getting the good or the evil twin? Pacino the actor who can still dazzle, or the over-the-top sputtering blowhard? Mamet the disciplined writer of The Untouchables and Glengarry Glen Ross or the self-indulgent filmmaker (The Winslow Boy) who dictates that everyone to speak in artificial, terse Mamet-talk?

Phil Spector veers toward the good -- although slick and easy -- and has the great added strength of Helen Mirren as Spector's reluctant lawyer, Linda Kenney Baden. We never ask the good/bad question about Mirren, who is reliably brilliant and fascinating here (with a giant blonde wig to call her own).

This story of character and legalities takes place entirely during Spector's first trial. Kenney Baden coughs and hacks her way through the trial, suffering from an illness never identified for us until the end of the film. No one can accuse Mirren of going for glamour. At first the lawyer looks at the evidence -- Clarkson met Spector that night, went to his house, was soon dead from a bullet shot directly into her mouth -- and has no idea how to defend an obviously guilty client. But as she weighs evidence, she comes to think that while Spector is guilty of a lot of horrific behavior in the past (including keeping women in his house at gunpoint) Clarkson probably accidentally killed herself.

Pacino plays it relatively cool, bringing out all Spector's nuances and eccentricities: the wigs, the gun collection, above all the refusal to listen to anyone else -- the ultimate sign of a successful man who thinks he's beyond all reason or rules. Spector won't admit, even to Kenney Baden, that he wears wigs, which may be the most telling sign of his self-delusion. Even Pacino's inevitable, sputtering, yelling, losing-control scene works because it's Spector losing control as he rehearses his testimony. This is Pacino's best performance since his last, even better HBO part, as Jack Kevorkian in Barry Levinson's You Don't Know Jack.

The film states bluntly at the start that it is fiction, and it works as a smoothly entertaining drama. But when it takes on a deeper question, the film shows its weakness: for all its naturalness, Mamet's screenplay is hollow, an easy gloss on fame and the peculiar phenomenon of media justice.

The characters of Spector and Kenney Baden, and in its emphasis the film, assume he will be found guilty because he's paying the price for O.J. and Michael Jackson -- every famous person who got off a serious charge. It's the old "the famous can never get a fair trial" approach, the accusation that the media spotlight creates injustice. Mamet himself said in an interview with the Financial Times: "Whether he did it or not, we'll never know, but if he'd just been a regular citizen, they never would have indicted him." The film never makes good on that claim.

And isn't that reasoning backwards anyway? Better to ask: How beyond-a-doubt guilty does a famous person have to be to get convicted, when so many get off despite piles of evidence against them?

The trial Kenney Baden handled (along with famous mob lawyer Bruce Cutler, played by Jeffrey Tambor) resulted in a hung jury. The retrial, which she wasn't part of, sent him away. The film doesn't pretend to sort out the facts behind all this, but there are plenty of other places to look.

For links to those pieces and to see a trailer for Phil Spector, please go to jamesonscreens.com

Review: Risk-taking James Franco's Risk-free Oz

2013-03-06T14:45:10-05:00

Flying moneys, good. Flying baboons, bad. That's one difference between the classic 1939 Wizard of Oz and Oz the Great and Powerful, Disney's pricey new extravaganza with James Franco as the pre-wizard carnival con man. More important: Don't go on comparing them. The new Oz is loaded with references, some direct and some tongue-in cheek, but mostly it is a sweeping, kinetic adventure all its own.

Director Sam Raimi has said the old Wizard of Oz is his favorite film, but that doesn't show here. This Oz is no more or less than a commercial enterprise, a movie that no one seems to have put much heart into. But it has appealing characters and terrific actors, and is definitely more fun than most attempts to piggyback on classics.

I may have been an easy target, of course. My favorite line from the classic is "And your little dog, too!" -- which is to say, I have no reverence or affection for the old Wizard and Judy Garland's pouty performance. And I do usually think James Franco is amazing, even and especially when he's taking an ambitious risk. Laugh at him for doing General Hospital as performance art if you like, but don't miss him as Allen Ginsberg in the underrated Howl. And I still say his disastrous Oscar gig with Anne Hathaway was not his fault; it was the writers'. (You can watch his funny recent interview with Stephen Colbert here; Colbert asks, "Are you a fraud?")

No one would call this Oz risky. As homage, it begins in black-and-white at the carnival, where Oz (real name, Oscar) is a hokey magician. His friends from this "real" world will return in different guises, in this case when his hot-air balloon drifts into a tornado and lands him in full-color Oz, a place whose name he shares. Fate? Coincidence? The film doesn't take on anything that complex. There, the Kansas woman he has loved, but been too ambitious to settle down with, reappears as Glinda, both played by Michelle Williams. His best friend from home is played by Zach Braff, who becomes the voice of Oz's loyal sidekick, Finley the flying monkey.

Franco's Oz is appealingly down-to-earth, even when he's being tricky and avaricious. The film might have been much more arch with Robert Downey Jr., who almost starred, or even more fantastical with Johnny Depp, who turned it down. With Franco keeping it rooted, the rivalry between witches provides the drama. Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz are sisters Theodora and Evanora, full of glamor and secrets, battling with Glinda for control of Emerald City and the affection of the would-be Wizard. Weisz is especially good at walking the line between Disney cartoon come to life -- her glittery green dress and the green emerald around her neck are classic Disney -- and a treacherous new character. Williams plays Glinda without the saccharine, thank goodness. One of the three will become the pointy-nosed, green-faced, cackling Wicked Witch we know so well.

The screenplay, by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire (writer of the wrenching drama, Rabbit Hole) is merely functional as it glances off and updates the story. There are ethnically diverse people in Oz now, including Munchkins; there are large-scale battles, including one in which Evanora dispatches those flying baboons. There are brief attempts at camp, with some nudging lines at the start (Frank interrupts Oz sweet-talking a woman, and Oz says, "There's a sock on the door!") that belong to a different film. But the battle between good and evil -- both within the hero's character and in the land of Oz -- is fairly foolproof.

Surprisingly, the 3-D, which should have been wondrous, is quite ordinary. The distant views of CGI'd castles look fairly shabby -- in a Disney movie of all things. Castles R Them. (I do like the green lightning bolts that flow from Evanora's hands as she tases Glinda, though.)

Whatever my problems with the old Wizard of Oz, it has retained a touch of magic, a remnant of the astonishment that must have struck moviegoers the first time black-and-white Kansas gave way to the yellow brick road and the Emerald City. It's hard to recreate that sense of wonder, and this film doesn't come close. Why expect it to? Oz The Great and Powerful is a pleasant, colorful fantasy for the moment ( or more accurately, 2 hours and 7 minutes).

Girls: Where Does Lena Dunham End and Hannah Begin?

2013-01-08T16:09:53-05:00

(Spoiler alert)

With the ultra-sharp new season of Girls, I finally understand -- though I don't agree with -- the Lena Dunham backlash. For all I know, in real life she's perfectly likable. But her character, Hannah, is the most squirm-inducing character on television. Hannah's total self-absorption (as if the world should be interested) and defiantly strong self-image is combined with its reverse: the cringingly bad self-image her bravado masks, and her utterly self-destructive relationships. Who would want to be this whiny mess' friend? But Dunham plays her so convincingly that the distance between herself and Hannah seems to vanish -- which is especially weird, considering that Dunham is the writer/director/actor/ and Judd Apatow protegee with a reported $3.5 million book deal and Hannah is a struggling, post-college work-in-progress.

The backlash itself has been odd, cloaked as an attack on Dunham as a privileged upper-middle-class white girl; but the "Who does she think she is?" response, and the hint that Dunham stumbled her way into success, reeks of envy. In fact, she is a daring artist who -- as this season makes extremely clear -- knows exactly what she's doing. I was relieved to read in a recent New York Times Style article that the Girls costume designer sometimes makes Hannah's oddball, unflattering clothes fit even worse than they have to. Her look reflects the way Dunham refuses to prettify Hannah's character, inside and out, never more so than in the first episodes of the new season, when her spikiness and sense of entitlement soar.

The season begins (Sunday on HBO) with her in bed, non-sexually, with her gay ex-boyfriend and current roommate, Elijah. (Did I mention self-destructive?) All around, her friends are floundering in new directions. Marnie gets fired. Jessa comes back from her honeymoon with the rich husband she scarcely knows. Shoshanna plays at being a sophisticated grown-up even though she awkwardly describes herself as recently "deflowered."

Dunham, who directed the first two episodes, gets great performances from the actors, especially Allison Williams, who shows the insecurity and the depth beneath Marnie's beauty, and Zosia Mamet, who make the quirky Shoshanna believable.

The Girls plots are sometimes unconvincing, especially when Elijah (Andrew Rannells) sleeps with someone who is a most implausible partner (and not just because she's a woman). And Hannah's new African-American boyfriend, Sandy (Donald Glover), seems too obvious a response to the criticism that the first season of Girls was pasteurized white.

But the dialogue can be brilliantly layered. During a fight that Hannah says is about race and politics, and Sandy knows is about his tepid reaction to her writing (yes, she's still a would-be writer, and I suspect an extremely self-indulgent one: all personal essays all the time). Hannah says, "I never thought about the fact that you were black once," and he calls her on it. "That's insane!" he says, "Because you should."

Even more layered: Hannah reacts smugly when Marnie gets a job as a hostess at a club. "I've made a choice... not to cash in my sexuality," Hannah says, and when Marnie is skeptical she adds: "Oh, you think I'm not pretty enough for a pretty person job?... A range of different kinds of men like me. Black men, Republicans, et al." ("Et al?" Marnie says, "Really?") Hannah's speech would sound a lot more convincing and less defensive if she weren't eating Cool Whip straight out of the container at the time -- the giveaway detail that reveals Dunham's knowing distance from her character.

It's not always possible to parse that distance, and maybe at times it truly disappears. Hannah is constantly tearing off her clothes for the cameras, and that's Dunham's imperfect body we're seeing, not just Hannah's. Dunham has said the nudity is way of showing that you don't have to be a size zero, which is fair enough. And as the child of a painter and a photographer, she grew up in an atmosphere in which nudity is no big deal; it's just what artists' use. Still, there is some in-your-face exhibitionism in the frequency of Dunham's nude scenes, and her rationale about body image echoes the insecure bluster of someone who mainlines Cool Whip while insisting she's sexy to many kinds of men.

Even so, Girls is inspired in the way it pushes the boundaries of comedy. In Episode 3, Hannah and Elijah do cocaine together so she can write about it, and the story is very funny until it turns ugly for reasons that have nothing directly to do with drugs: someone simply blurts out the truth, always a dangerous thing. Dunham grasps the power of truth with such clarity that Girls is less comfortable and closer to the nerve than ever.

For more reviews and to watch a trailer for Girls, please go to jamesonscreens.com

Television Review: Downton Abbey, the Middle Class and America

2013-01-03T12:15:45-05:00

Season 3 of Downton Abbey -- as soapy, dramatic and witheringly funny as ever, and at times shatteringly sad -- begins in the spring of 1920, and everything now has a whiff of the modern. Daisy the kitchen maid rides a bike through the village, Mary and Matthew are planning their wedding, Anna is determined to find the evidence that will free Bates from prison, and in the midst of all that comes the real bombshell. Lord Grantham has made a very bad investment, losing most of his American wife's fortune; they may have to put Downton on the market. Viewers caught in the 2008 economic crisis can relate.

When Robert tearfully apologizes about the loss, Cora reassures him: "Don't worry about me. I'm an American -- have gun, will travel." Not the most eloquent phrase she ever spoke (and while not technically anachronistic, would Cora have known it?), but the sentiment perfectly expresses how this season flatters both America and that newfangled idea, the middle class.

Remember that Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) was a middle-class lawyer before he was unexpectedly declared heir, so it's no surprise that he tries to drag Downton into solvency and the future, with Lord Grantham kicking and screaming. And he has an unlikely ally: Sybil returns with her husband, the chauffeur formerly known as Branson, now called by the family, with varying degrees of discomfort, Tom. Matthew and Tom become forward-looking brothers-in-law-in-arms, the young and dashing antidotes to all that Edwardian stuffiness, lined up against the traditionalists represented by Lord Grantham, Lady Mary and the Dowager Countess.

And there you have writer Julian Fellowes' clever masterstroke: allowing us to wallow once more in the grandeur and excess of the aristocracy, as well as the downstairs world of both loyal and scheming servants, while inching the entire household toward the present. It's having your rich Downton cake and watching it be eaten up too.

Of course the highly-publicized godmother of this season's practical can-do-ism is Cora's American mother, Martha Levinson, played by Shirley MacLaine. With red hair and red lipstick, she arrives in a red car and displays a brashness to match the hauteur of the Dowager (Maggie Smith is, as always, incomparable). Fortunately, Mrs. Levinson is just as wily as the Dowager, and MacLaine and Smith's scenes together are irresistible, if disappointingly underwritten. (And, her name is Levinson? With a home in WASPy Newport? There must be some interesting backstory, which the series never acknowledges.)

Even when the lines disappoint, though, the actors magnificently rescue them. When Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), Mary (Michelle Dockery) and Martha visit the Dowager for tea, Mary nudges her rich American Grandmama for more money with, "I hope you do think Mama's fortune has been well spent on shoring up an ancient family." MacLaine allows Martha to knowingly lay on her Americaness for the Dowager's benefit, waving her hand and saying, "Ah, ya gotta spend it on somethin'." Smith's face barely moves but she looks aghast.

MacLaine's character hightails it back to America after Sunday's two-hour season premiere, but the series' pace never slows. No spoilers here, even though I have seen the entire season except for the final episode, the Christmas special, with a huge spoiler easy to find online. I will say there is more than one wedding, more than one birth, more than one death, and eventually even a madwoman in the attic (not necessarily Downton's attic). There is much distress over the wearing of dinner jackets rather than white tie at Downton dinners, due to servant error. (So hard to keep good help on a budget.)

Season 4 is in the works, so one way or another, Downton Abbey has future as a house and as a pop-culture phenomenon that has fueled hilarious parodies, at least one of them from the cast itself. If you missed Hugh Bonneville (Lord Grantham), Jim Carter (Carson the butler) and Rob James-Collier (Thomas the valet) on The Colbert Report reenacting Downton as if it were Breaking Bad, you can watch it here.

Image originally appeared on Indiewire.com. A longer version of this review is on jamesonscreens.com.

Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington Talk About Race, the N-Word, And Django Unchained (Video Interview)

2012-12-20T09:45:28-05:00

When I asked Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington if they had refused anything that director Quentin Tarantino asked them to do or say in Django Unchained -- you can imagine that these very smart African-American actors, playing slaves, might tell their white director where to draw the line -- I got a very revealing non-answer. "We'll keep that private," Foxx said, then went on to describe the dynamics on set, including what he thinks about the N-word, how Leonardo DiCaprio felt saying it, what Samuel L. Jackson told Leo.

Washington, speaking just as passionately about the film and its subject, points out that their characters, Broomhilda and Django, were violating the law by being married, because marriage between slaves got in the way of "the business of selling people."

Django Unchained is one of the best films of the year, even if it is "a brilliant mess," as I said in my year-end best-films list. Its sprawling range is part of its huge ambition, as Tarantino blends homage to spaghetti Westerns, moments of comedy (you have to see Foxx dressed in a foppish suit with breeches, straight from Gainsborough's 'Blue Boy"), shootout scenes in which the screen seems to be raining blood, and most of all a visceral portrayal of the horrors of slavery, including a scene in which Washington's character is whipped.

Take a look at what Foxx and Washington had to say in our brief but packed video interview. (And you can watch my interview with Christoph Waltz, who is fantastic as the bounty hunter who frees Django and helps him find Broomhilda, here.)

Jamie Foxx & Kerry Washington talk about Django Unchained from Caryn James on Vimeo. Video edited by Taylor Levy.

Is Life of Pi More Than an Adventure Movie?

2012-11-20T18:34:09-05:00

Life of Pi is not entirely about a boy and his tiger; but there is a lot about a boy and a tiger, and if you don't like adventure tales, this is not the film for you.

If technique were everything, the film -- whose 3-D wonders including a stormy shipwreck and the most lifelike CGI animal ever - would be a masterpiece. It proves yet again that Ang Lee is a master filmmaker, whose works range from the beautiful and eloquent (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Age) to the overrated (yes, Brokeback Mountain.) But Pi is impressive without being as consequential as its director's pedigree and its Oscar-bait timing suggest.

Taking a realistic approach to a fabulist story, the film offers a rich, satisfying buildup. Rafe Spall, as a would-be writer in Canada, is hearing the story from the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan), who recalls his boyhood in India. As we see it in the film's most charming, beautiful sequences, Pi's family owned a zoo. Their acquisitions included a Bengal tiger who, because of a bureaucratic mix-up, arrived with the name Richard Parker. The tiger is a magnificent-looking creature but, as Pi's father teaches him, he's a predator, not a lamb-like pet.

When the family and the zoo are shipwrecked on the way to Canada, it's off to the FX, and the central part of the film begins. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat with the tiger -- and for a time, a sick zebra and a vicious hyena. Yann Martel's hugely best-selling novel could only have imagined the vibrant scenes that Ang Lee creates: brutal sun, star-filled nights, countless dolphins and the wary distance that Pi -- nearly starving and parched -- must keep from the hungry tiger, even while trying to tame him. As the adolescent Pi, Suraj Sharma captures his determination to survive, building a raft to keep him safe from the tiger, catching fish and tossing the odd one to Richard Parker. Those details work in a Call of the Wild kind of way, but we spend a loooong time at sea.

Despite his humanized name and lifelike presence, Richard Parker never becomes a character, which is very a good thing. The animal never becomes touchy-feely cute, which offers a clue to the tough realities beneath a surface that becomes increasingly fantastic -- there's a magical island so full of meerkats it looks like the ground is restlessly moving.

Those darker truths only surface near the end when the adult Pi resumes his story, and it turns out that Pi wants to be more than an adventure film, an ambition it doesn't pull off. The film is pointedly about what we choose to believe, which mythical stories we put our faith in. The theme is not delivered as treacly spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo, so we can be thankful for that small favor. But it does come as a twist, and the more realistic stories before and after Pi's ordeal at sea make the film feel like a disjointed triptych.

It's easy to see why Pi was such a solid choice for the New York Film Festival's opening night, though: It has impeccable artistic credentials, is easy-going and unchallenging. But it's not a film you fall in love with. At his best Ang Lee can make films that knock you over emotionally; Life of Pi just isn't one of them.

To see a trailer for the film and find more reviews, please visit jamesonscreens.com.

Skyfall: Bond Is Older, Wiser, Better

2012-11-11T16:40:18-05:00

Daniel Craig looks craggier than ever in Skyfall, which is part of the film's sly, obvious-yet-effective theme. Without slowing down the intricate, explosive action that defines a Bond movie, director Sam Mendes and a sharper-than-usual screenplay create a story in which Bond is feeling his middle-age; gizmo-happy Q is a young computer-whiz played by Ben Whishaw; and in this new world where terrorist threats arrive on your hacked laptop, M -- played once more and quite touchingly by Judi Dench -- is considered an old fart.

Ha! It's not shocking to find that Bond and M still have their edge, but there are other, better surprises. Mendes handles the action expertly, but he is a character-driven director (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) and the relationships in Skyfall are so much richer than in previous Bonds that we actually get to see his childhood home -- an isolated old pile in Scotland. In a suitable tribute to the 50-year-old franchise's own middle age, all this attention to the hero's longevity and creakiness adds a huge jolt of fresh energy. (The screenplay is credited to regular Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, and John Logan; it's a good guess that the rewrite from Logan, who wrote Gladiator and Hugo, is what made it sparkle.)

The film sets its more somber tone with a visually striking, animated title sequence full of skulls, shadows and omens of death. Then comes the de rigeur chase sequence to open the film, with Bond racing after a villain through the streets of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and beyond, while his MI6 colleague Eve (Naomie Harris) drives in pursuit. Bond rides a motorcycle over rooftops, and engages in that old standard, the fistfight on top of a moving train. But the film's originality kicks in during this sequence when M has to make a crucial decision - is she willing have Eve take a desperate gunshot at the terrorist tangling with Bond, and possibly hit Bond instead?

Whatever her decision, we know that Bond is a survivor. And although Skyfall offers glimpses of his old womanizing style, focused on Berenice Marlohe slinking around a casino, it may be the least Bond-girlish film in the series' history. His real girl here is M. Theirs is a subtle, eloquently unstated relationship, in which they protect and care for each other. Craig and Dench show the value of having substantial actors, and not pretty mannequins, in the roles.

Even the major villain, Silva -- in a dazzling, eccentric turn by Javier Bardem, wearing yet another conspicuously wacko wig -- is part of the relationship story. He's the man who can lead them to a stolen thumb drive exposing the names of MI6 agents undercover in terrorist cells; he is also a former MI 6 agent frustrated at not having been valued enough by M. As he acknowledges, he and Bond are competing for Mother's affection. In a playful episode when Silva captures Bond, he also adds a gay subtext; maybe Silva desires his handsome enemy, but Bond gets the hilarious last word.

If M is Bond's surrogate mother, at his childhood home they find Albert Finney, playing the caretaker and his surrogate father. These revelations add layers to the man lurking behind the bland numbers 007.

The film gains great strength from its supporting characters, including Whishaw and Ralph Fiennes as the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee overseeing MI6, who has a few surprises of his own. (No offense to Craig, but I can easily see Fiennes as a suave Bond.) And the film looks fantastic - boldly colored yet crisp -- largely because Mendes brought along his frequent collaborator, the great cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Although some hyperbolic early reviews somehow made this sound like the new Citizen Kane, don't expect something other than a Bond film. But at a time when Mad Men and '60s nostalgia is common, Skyfall is terrific, entertaining proof that Bond can age and thrive in the world of today, even while dusting off and driving his now-vintage Aston Martin.

And if you missed Craig on Saturday Night Live with some lesser-known Bond girls -- including Fred Armisen as Penny Marshall - catch it here.

For more reviews and to see trailer for Skyfall, please go to jamesonscreens.com

Movie Review: The Paperboy -- Kidman, Efron, Alligators

2012-10-04T18:35:40-04:00

On screen in The Paperboy and on stage at the New York Film Festival press conference afterwards, Nicole Kidman seemed -- and this is compliment though it may not sound like one -- less plastic than she has in the recent past. She is fearless and pretty convincing in the film. If she looks too well-scrubbed and well-dressed for the character -- Charlotte, a woman you can only call trashy, who writes sexy letters to prisoners and falls in love with a convicted killer -- you can almost justify it because her Barbie look fits the conventions of Lee Daniels' pulpy psycho-sexual drama. As Daniels explained in his part of the press conference, he wanted the film, set in 1969, to reflect the colors and style of a '70s thriller.

But cogent explanations only take you so far. Daniels is a director who takes daring to extremes, sometimes to the point of being wrong-headed. Taking risks worked in Precious; his critically reviled Shadowboxer was another story. The Paperboy tries to give substance to its increasingly lurid story, but the bloody violence and over-the-top sex commandeer the film, offering a slicker, more superficial experience. Still, while the reports from Cannes and other screenings prepared me for a dismissible flop, I ended up respecting the film for its terrific performances and its ability to draw you into its vivid, unsavory world -- even though the film finally doesn't cohere or amount to much.

Daniels is amazing with actors, as he proved in Precious. The big surprise here is Zac Efron as Jack, booted out of college and wasting time at home in small-town Florida. His brother, Ward, played by Matthew McConaughey in a wonderfully cagey performance, is a Miami reporter who comes to town with a writer from his paper, a black man from Britain named Yardley (David Oyelowo), to investigate a convicted killer's suspicious trial. The man facing death row is the very man Charlotte loves, so she comes to town too, wearing bright minidresses and heavy false eyelashes, to meet her fiance and prove his innocence.

There is not a lot of innocence to go around in this crowd. The film, based on a novel by Pete Dexter (who co-wrote the screenplay with Daniels) says that everyone has dark secrets, and the trajectory unmasks its characters' ugliest truths. It's a rough business, which includes visits to an alligator-ridden swamp and to prison, where the accused killer (a creepy John Cusack) seems deranged enough to murder someone in the visitors' room. He doesn't. Instead, he and Charlotte sit across from each other and shamelessly masturbate while Ward, Yardley and Jack look on. Daniels' camera is surprisingly discrete here and in another, already notorious scene, in which Charlotte pees on Jack after he has been stung by a jellyfish. Suggesting what they're doing is enough to make his points.

The changes from Dexter's novel emphasize the era's racism; Yardley was originally a white character. The addition adds ballast to the film, but not enough to make the characters seem real, and certainly not enough to make us want to spend much time in their world. The film's garish colors give Daniels that '70s look he wanted, but I suspect he was after something more than pulp.

I was never bored, though, and I have to admire Daniels for making the film he wanted to. In fact, there was only one scene where I thought he went too far: the convicted killer's swamp-dwelling uncle slices open an alligator, and we see guts pour out in voluminous, close-up detail. Over-the-top sex? OK. Toss in alligator guts and you've pushed me too far.

To watch the trailer for The Paperboy and read more reviews, please go to jamesonscreens at Indiewire.

Movie Review, The Master: Egotists and the Cultists Who Love Them

2012-09-24T21:48:29-04:00

With its expansive 70 mm images, The Master almost pounces on you as it announces its epic scope and ambition -- even though the impressive vistas of the sea don't have anything to do with the heart of the film. In its intelligent, chilly essence, Paul Thomas Anderson's film is an intense, eye-to-eye war between two different yet interdependent psyches. Philip Seymour Hoffman is magnificent as the charming, voracious, monomaniacal charlatan who needs worshippers the way he needs air, a man so much The Master that his name, Lancaster Dodd, isn't mentioned for most of the film. Joaquin Phoenix is nearly as effective as the jittery, off-putting Freddie Quell, a GI back from World War II, belligerent yet so unconsciously needy he is swooped into Dodd's cultish vortex almost without realizing what's happening.

Their taut, fascinating relationship could easily have been depicted with less big-screen hoopla. And that distance between the film's lavish visual style and its tightly-wound substance may be the reason The Master (which just opened wider around the country) is so uneven, and has evoked such love-it-or-hate-it, "It's a classic" or "Bored to death" responses. At its best the film is too powerfully good to ignore, yet it is too flawed and at times too hollow to approach anything like greatness.

The style may not be necessary but it can be enthralling, especially in an early sequence, when the camera swoops across the ocean toward Dodd's yacht. (The cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., was also dp on Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro and visually stunning Youth Without Youth.) In one eye-catching scene, Freddie runs on the beach -- racing across the foreground of the screen from left to right -- as the yacht approaches in the background from the other direction, and we have our first glimpse of Dodd, dancing with his wife among their party guests.

It's clear that Freddie has landed in another world, because we have already followed his nasty downward slide. We first see him as a soldier, his eyes and nose peering above a trench, evoking the World War II graffiti captioned "Kilroy was here." (Anderson is careful and deliberate with the period touches.) Soon Freddie is humping a woman made of sand on the beach -- he's really nobody's hero -- and then is back home drinking anything that comes to hand, including paint thinner. Wandering from New York to California, unable to hold a job, he is ready to be taken in, in every sense.

And Dodd, a best-selling author who believes in past lives and the threat of space aliens, is ready to acquire another worshipper. Hoffman has never put his physical heft to better use as a man of voracious appetites: for women, food, the corrosive liquor that Freddie concocts after he sneaks onto the yacht and becomes part of the Dodd household.

Together, Hoffman and Phoenix are amazing to watch. Dodd challenges Freddie with a "Processing" session, asking uncomfortable questions -- that's how we find out that Freddie has slept with his aunt -- telling him not to blink. It's a war of wills and power that the Master doesn't admit to and the follower doesn't begin to understand. That central scene is shot in extreme close-ups. On a giant screen (I saw the film in 70 mm at the Ziegfeld) the men are as huge and hovering as The Wizard of Oz. The irony, of course, is that this kind of faceoff works every bit as well on a smaller scale. Freddie is a nobody, Dodd a posturer, and the big screen doesn't make that any more or less visceral.

Seeing The Master through the gloss of Scientology is not essential either, though it helps. Despite the allusions to "Processing" and aliens (there's no need to mention Thetans; we get the point) the film is not about any particular cult. It's about outsized egotists and the cultists who love them. It's about control and emotional need, and the weird symbiosis of leader and follower.

To read more of this review and see a trailer of The Master, please visit jamesonscreens.com at Indiewire.

The Big Chill Speaks French in Little White Lies (Movie Review)

2012-08-23T18:37:01-04:00

In the raucous club scene that opens Little White Lies, the actor playing the obnoxious, drug-snorting lech named Ludo looks so familiar you might find yourself thinking, "Who's that loud guy?" That guy is Jean Dujardin from The Artist, so at least in the U.S. loud is definitely going against type. Don't expect him to stick around for long. He's the one left behind in Paris (we quickly find out why) while his closest friends, all seven of them, escape for their annual vacation by the sea.

Writer/director Guillaume Canet freely admits that this comic drama about the secrets and confidences, tensions, loyalties and tangled relationships among this group inching toward 40 is inspired by The Big Chill and other movies, but his very appealing homage makes deja vu seem like a pretty good thing. Little White Lies is slighter than Canet's taut, first-rate thriller Tell No One, and it would be a miracle if it became the major hit here that it was in France, but it has a shaggy, insidious charm of its own.

Its greatest strength is the cast, which doesn't include the director (familiar as an actor in films like Last Night with Keira Knightley). Francois Cluzet -- whose versatility ranges from Tell No One to the quadraplegic in The Intouchables -- is at the group's center as Max, a control freak, restaurant owner, and the slightly older friend whose house is the setting for the vacation.

In the story's most refreshing turn, the men, not the women, are almost all lovelorn. Antoine (Gilles Lellouche) is hung up on old girlfriend who dumped him a year ago. Vincent (Benoit Magimel), a supposedly happily married chiropractor, meets Max for a drink in Paris and in a funny, deft episode tells his pal that he has something more than a man-crush on him. The scene perfectly sets up some of the painful explosions to come. Eric, an actor, is a raffish, selfish, perpetually juvenile womanizer, yet somehow Laurent Lafitte's sympathetic portrayal makes more than a cliche.

The women, including Max and Vincent's wives, are pallid characters, with the exception of Marion Cotillard as Marie, an anthropologist. She's bisexual, adventurous, Ludo's former love interest, wracked by her own doubts and fears, yet definitely a woman and not one of the boys. (Makes sense that Canet gave his real-life love the best part.)

Little White Lies works because Canet shrewdly taps into the secret behind the enduring appeal of The Big Chill: not its characters, but the winning fantasy of a country escape filled with warm, close, not-always-easy but permanent friendship. The iconic scene of The Big Chill is the upbeat one in which the friends make dinner and dance to old Motown songs, a spirit Canet embraces right down to the nearly wall-to-wall nostalgia-fueled American soundtrack that includes the Isley Brothers, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater and -- in a late karaoke appearance by Ludo -- Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero. It's worth remembering that The Big Chill began with a funeral, because after all the fraught coming together, splitting apart and soul-searching, Little White Lies jolts us with a weepy ending that it has actually earned.

Running two-and-a-half hours, the film is far too long, and is ultimately as shallow as it sketchily-written characters. Yet Canet's warm, ensemble piece engages us right through to it final visceral punch.

To watch a trailer of Little White Lies and read more reviews please visit jamesonscreens.com

Cosmopolis, Beyond the RPatz PR Tour (Review)

2012-08-20T10:12:37-04:00

Whatever David Cronenberg thought he was doing while making Cosmopolis, he could never have imagined the most relevent cultural nerve it would hit: the film has become the inadvertent cause of Robert Pattinson's first post-KStew publicity tour. (If you missed Pattinson's appearance with Jon Stewart, eating Ben & Jerry's as breakup comfort food, watch it here. It's a classic of obliquely addressing an issue without really saying anything.) In itself, Cosmopolis is smart and stylized -- which doesn't inoculate this story of a sad young Wall St. billionaire against lethal familiarity and dullness.

For once, Pattinson's stiffness works in his favor as Eric Packer, an affectless young billionaire looking for meaning as his self-made financial empire crumbles in a single day. It's not Pattinson's fault that Cronenberg's script, from a 2003 novel by Don DeLillo, has dialogue so detached from reality that it sounds like faux David Mamet, and a theme that has become tame after the post-2008 financial meltdown.

Packer has his limo cruise New York City -- often it's Toronto, doing a bad job of masquerading as New York -- on an ostensible mission to get a haircut, even though his security people warn him the president is in town creating gridlock and security concerns. People in Packer's life traipse through the film, most of them dropping by his limo as if it were a traveling apartment. It's as big as some Manhattan studios; see how unsubtle the observations about the economy and injustice are?

The glamorous blonde wife (Sarah Gadon) he hardly knows actually gets Packer to set foot outside his car; she's about to leave him anyway. Juliette Binoche drops by the limo, as an art dealer who has sex with Eric and as post-tryst conversation tries to explain that a Rothko chapel he wants is not for sale. Samantha Morton has the worst role and most pedantic dialogue; the fact that she plays a kind of in-house philosopher is not much of an excuse.

Pattinson give it his tightly wound best even when saddled with lines like "The urge to destroy is a creative urge," even when he has to endure an inordinately long prostate exam in the limo. Pattinson and Cronenberg have talked about the film's humor, and the absurdity of that daily medical exam comes closest, but mostly they seem to have left any humor on the page.

To read more of this review and watch the trailer, please visit jamesonscreens.com